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From Slave to Pharaoh: The Black Experience of Ancient Egypt

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Redford's book presents some excellent documentation on Egyptian-Nubian relations, but both its development and title appear flawed. The sub-title `the black experience in Egypt' seems unfortunate and a bit presumptuous. Imagine an alternative book that rounds up negative Egyptian statements on people like lighter-skinned Libyans, Syriacs, Phoenicians, Greeks, Mesopotamians etc and calls it `the White experience in Egypt." Such a title and the development of it, would seem questionable at the very least. The same thing applies to this book.

Part of the reason for the book seems to be striking a blow at radical Afrocentrists and indeed they are mentioned in the preface where Redford says he wants the ancient Egyptian texts to speak for themselves, politically incorrect as it may be. This a laudable goal but unjustly slights scholarship on the rich diversity of human populations in Egypt.

Any claim of `the black experience' calls out for definition of exactly what or who is `black.' Redford avoids defining this, leaving the reader with the impression that `black' equals `foreign.' It fact it is not. Mainstream Egyptology (see Yurco 1989- `Where the Ancient Egyptians Black?') has long recognized that the ancient Egyptians had a range of physical features and skin colors as part of the native mix. Dark skin is no more `foreign' to Egypt than light-brown skin. Focusing on one limited type of dark-skinned foreigner and calling that limited slice `the black experience in Egypt' seems a travesty of scholarship.

The notion of a `black experience' also implies that the Nubians and this by extension `blacks' were mere walk-on actors in Egyptian history, framing them in the context slavery and conquered peoples. These, like the American TV show `The Jeffersons' would eventually, millennia later, `move on up' to become pharaohs for a brief flicker of time before departing far south from whence they came. This limited view of `the black experience' may strike a blow in ongoing battles with Afrocentrists, but it unnecessarily mars what is otherwise a fair history of Nubian-Egyptian relations in the context of conquest and colonialism.

The history of Egypt shows that `black' or dark-skinned populations were in place as part of the native landscape from the very beginnings, from the Pre-Dynastic period through the Dynastic era. These darker-skinned peoples were more prevalent in the south, and it is from the south, that the Egyptian state was consolidated and the pharaonic dynasties began. This is basic Egyptology 101. Any claim to speak of `a black experience' must begin with these peoples. As 'Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt' (1999) puts it: `There is now a sufficient body of evidence from modern studies of skeletal remains to indicate that the ancient Egyptians, especially southern Egyptians, exhibited physical characteristics that are within the range of variation for ancient and modern indigenous peoples of the Sahara and tropical Africa.'

Redford's implication that the Nubians were all very dark skinned or `black; is also undermined by mainstream scholarship. Visual images produced by the Nubians themselves show that they self-depicted as a range of physical types- from light-brown skin to jet-black skin, from thin to broad noses, etc. This range of types is documented in authoritative publications such as (Africa in Antiquity: The Arts of Ancient Nubia, 1978). Redford by contrast uses a series of stereotypically very black images including that used on the book's cover, downplaying Nubian population diversity and variability of the area to maintain his particular `spin' on the subject.

The book's strengths are its excellent documentation of inscriptions, and the wide range of diverse functions filled by Nubians and Sudanics within Egypt. Analysis of the so-called `black' dynasties who actually conquered Egypt is also fair. These are commendable points but they are somewhat marred by the lens Redford uses. Numerous negative statements on foreign peoples like Nubians are rounded up, but as scholar Frank Yurco points out the Nubians were the people ethnically closest to the Egyptians, not the more Caucasoid peoples of say southern Europe. To cast these interactions in simplistic racial terms does not do justice to what is historical. Furthermore as Yurco 1989 and Barry Kemp (Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, 2005) points out, Egyptian negativity on foreigners was primarily in the political context, not a racial one. This undermines Redford's slant on the information he presents. In Kemp's book for example (pg 23), lighter-skinned Asiatics are compared to reptiles but few serious scholars are rounding up such negative Egyptian statements, or Egyptian military triumphs over such peoples and presenting it as `the white experience in Egypt.'

In his preface Redford says the information presented from the Egyptian text, would have had more of the 'salutary effect in marginalizing some prejudices.' But ironically, his framing of the issues re a `black experience' seems that it would achieve quite the opposite effect- reinforcing rather than marginalizing prejudices. This is a sad result from what could have been a fresh take on the interactions between the peoples of the Nile Valley.

This is the definitive, most solid and balanced book to date on the subject of the Black experience of ancient Egypt, covering even one instance of Egyptian royal slave-raiding on Nubia on a scale that partly depopulated Nubia. The depth and breadth of research shown in Redford's fifty-four pages of endnotes & bibliography indicates a life-time of research.

This reviewer's only criticisms are that maps 2 & 3 (pp.25,73) are full of place names ending in -opolis. Such Greek names cannot have been in use by the 8th century BCE, still less by the 17th century BCE. The author should have inserted the real names ancient Egyptians used for them, with their later Hellenic names in brackets.

In Figure 25, (p.118) some of the words need to be in bold font or larger size to help legibility. Similarly, map 4 (p.141) should indicate in its key what the dashed underwater lines represent.

Keith Gottschalk
Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence 2009-2010
Oakland University, Michigan.

Political Studies Dept,
University of the Western Cape,
Cape Town, South Africa.